Institute of Queer Ecology’s
“Field Station” at Pioneer Works, NYC, 2023.
Image Credit - Walter Wlodarczyk

Co-directed by Lee Pivnik and Nicolas Baird since 2017, the Institute of Queer Ecology (IQECO), is a collaborative organism that has worked with over 150 different artists to present interdisciplinary programming.

Unbound by medium or method, IQECO oscillates between curating programs and directly producing artworks. IQECO projects are interdisciplinary, but grounded in the theoretical framework of Queer Ecology, an adaptive practice concerned with interconnectivity, intimacy, and multispecies relationality.
Queer ecology can be a tool for understanding ourselves, our environments, our biologies, and our collaborations through queer lenses. It teaches queer strategies of transformation and symbiosis—mutability and mutualism—that allow us to reinhabit and rehabilitate a planet experiencing profound and rapid changes.

IQECO explores the overlaps between queer cultural production and multispecies biological adaptation to reveal a vibrant and complex world of belonging.

The Institute of Queer Ecology has presented projects with the Guggenheim Museum (New York, NY), the United Nations - ART 2030 (New York, NY), the Institute of Contemporary Art (Miami, Florida), the Everson Museum (Syracuse, NY), the Julia Stoschek Collection (Düsseldorf, Germany), Centre Pompidou-Metz (Metz, France), Museum Schloss Moyland, (Bedburg-Hau, Germany), Kestner Gesellschaft (Hannover, Germany) the Medellín Museum of Modern Art (Medellín, Colombia), the Museum of Contemporary Art Belgrade (Serbia), the Biennale of Sydney (Australia), Prairie (Chicago, IL), Bas Fisher Invitational (Miami, FL) Gas Gallery (Los Angeles, CA), and Vox Populi (Philadelphia, PA), among others.

SELECTED PROJECTS

Metamorphosis (2020)

A film series by the Institute of Queer Ecology

Directed and Edited by Lee Pivnik
Voiced by Mykki Blanco and Danny Orlowski
Commissioned by DIS for release online at DIS.ART

Prelude: Serotiny (05:25 minutes)
Episode 1: Grub Economics (14:28 minutes)
Episode 2: Liquidation in the Pupal Stage (12:40 minutes)
Episode 3: Emergence (14:50 minutes)

Download Press Release
Metamorphosis is released exclusively online at DIS.ART,
in partnership with the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum as a part of the film program for Countryside, The Future.
For screening requests, please contact info@queerecology.org.

Metamorphosis is a 3-part proposal by the Institute of Queer Ecology to restructure how the world is imagined and how it operates today. These three stages are modeled after the life cycles of holometabolous insects: bugs who undergo a “complete metamorphosis” where the organism fully restructures itself to adapt to its changing needs and ensure its survival.
Relying on this metaphorical transformation, IQECO aims to help catalyze a planet-wide transformation from the prevailing extractive relationship with the earth to one characterized by regeneration and care: a shift from making “nature” subservient, to working with the natural world and, in that process, remaking ourselves and our relationships—to each other, and the world.

Metamorphosis recasts the main agents of the environmental crisis as the global industries that profit from products they know are toxic, while simultaneously forcing reliance on them. In this way, the film asserts that capitalism forces us into a kind of perpetual larval stage, an incessant need to consume and accumulate resources, in a way that resembles how caterpillars rapidly increase their weight ten-thousandfold in less than three weeks.

When a caterpillar enters its cocoon, it releases enzymes that dissolve most of its bodily tissues, liquifying itself to be rebuilt. Liquidity, of course, has an economic association, referring to assets being made liquid in times of crisis, or growth.

The organism in the film reconstitutes itself in the specific form of a gynandromorphic swallowtail butterfly, an exceptionally beautiful insect that simultaneously exhibits male and female patterning (especially evident in this species because of sexual dimorphism). Through CGI rendering, this insect is reanimated from a pinned specimen in the butterfly collection at the University of Florida. Visually, this animates a metaphor for a warm, blurry, queer future, and poetically speculates on how to get there in a long-form video manifesto. Building off of José Esteban Muñoz’s notions of a Queer Utopia, lessons learned through Emergent Strategy (adrienne maree brown), and the concept of the Capitalocene (as articulated by Jason W. Moore, Raj Patel, Naomi Klein, and many others), Metamorphosis presses us to imagine with more ambition what could emerge from this multifaceted crisis.

Queerness, we claim, is a strategy as important as imagination, rooted as it is in a history of establishing alternative worlds of mutual support and care that bloom in the spaces underneath and between this one.

A body breaks down and a new one forms from the same material.

This change comes from within.

DIS.ART is a streaming platform for entertainment and education—edutainment. DIS enlists leading artists and thinkers to expand the reach of key conversations bubbling up through contemporary art, culture, activism, philosophy, and technology. Every video proposes something—a solution, a question—a way to think about our shifting reality.

Still from Metamorphosis, prelude, Serotiny, 2020.
Image courtesy of the Institute of Queer Ecology and DIS.

Still from Metamorphosis, prelude, Serotiny, 2020.
Image courtesy of the Institute of Queer Ecology and DIS.

Still from Metamorphosis, episode 1, Grub Economics, 2020.
Image courtesy of the Institute of Queer Ecology and DIS.

Still from Metamorphosis, episode 1, Grub Economics, 2020.
Image courtesy of the Institute of Queer Ecology and DIS.

Still from Metamorphosis, episode 2, Liquidation in the Pupal Stage, 2020.
Image courtesy of the Institute of Queer Ecology and DIS.

Still from Metamorphosis, episode 2, Liquidation in the Pupal Stage, 2020.
Image courtesy of the Institute of Queer Ecology and DIS.

Still from Metamorphosis, episode 3, Emergence, 2020.
Image courtesy of the Institute of Queer Ecology and DIS.

Still from Metamorphosis, episode 3, Emergence, 2020.
Image courtesy of the Institute of Queer Ecology and DIS.

Still from Metamorphosis, episode 3, Emergence, 2020.
Image courtesy of the Institute of Queer Ecology and DIS.

Still from Metamorphosis, episode 3, Emergence, 2020.
Image courtesy of the Institute of Queer Ecology and DIS.

H.O.R.I.Z.O.N.
(Habitat One: Regenerative Interactive Zone of Nurture) (2021)

A downloadable, participatory artwork taking the form of a social simulation game,
produced by the Institute of Queer Ecology (IQECO) for the Guggenheim Museum.

H.O.R.I.Z.O.N. was commissioned by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum as a form of public programming for Countryside, The Future. Additional funding for this work was provided by a Knight Arts Challenge grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.

Game Developer: Matthew Cormack
3D Modeller / Sound Designer: Valerie Caputo

Concept & Production Team:
Nicolas Baird
Raphaëlle Cormier
Ceci Moss
Lee Pivnik
Jen Sillen

Soundtrack: Mechatok

With the support of the Guggenheim Museum’s curatorial and public programs departments:
Alan Seise
Laili Amighi
Jennifer Yee
Troy Conrad Therrien
Ashley Mendelsohn

!

Greetings, and welcome to Habitat One: Regenerative Interconnected Zone of Nurture, also known as HORIZON. If you have found your way here, you are exactly where you are meant to be. Welcome home. My name is LAVNDR.73 and I have been programmed to assist you in getting settled. Since you’re new to HORIZON, you may find it helpful to learn a bit about our community’s founding.

The twilight of what we now call the Capitalocene was a turbulent period for all of Earth’s inhabitants. For centuries, powerful humans exploited a perversion of Cartesian duality to establish a binary worldview and rationalize their superiority over all other planetary kin, including segments of their own species. Over time, this complex evolved into a global order dependent on the extraction of Earth’s resources to serve the biological and political needs of human kind. As with any tectonic shift, quakes, collisions, and eruptions were inevitable. The labor needed to extract and process the planet’s natural resources demanded an ever-growing human population, which in turn required more resources. These resources, as you are likely aware, were limited and uneven in distribution. The world’s many nations, whose own bodies politic were violently fractured, waged war on one another and ecological disaster ensued.

For a time, the powerful were able to justify these inconveniences with marvelous inventions and profound advancements in science, technology, and architecture. Pragmatists attempted to use these developments to remedy some the most urgent challenges; they built satellites to monitor the changing climate (and surveille their enemies), robotic pollinators to replace insects facing immanent extinction, and UV light pods to grow produce in increasingly unfavorable conditions. Indeed, the code that quantifies my very own existence as an artificial intelligence was developed during this period. Nevertheless, the forests continued to burn, the oceans continued to rise, the air became more toxic, and the water increasingly impotable. Various animals were forced to flee their natural habitats in search of more favorable conditions. This combined with practices of agricultural cultivation of livestock for food resulted in animals and humans encountering each other in manners unprecedented. In year 2019 AD, a bat had one such encounter with a pangolin near location 30.5928° N latitude, 114.3055° E longitude. The bodies of both species served as hosts for distinct yet similar viruses which, upon their meeting, combined and mutated into a novel coronavirus with the capacity to infect the human body.

The zoonotic virus known as SARS-CoV-2 manifested as a fever, dry cough, pneumonia, and in some cases death. Fatality was particularly prevalent among the most vulnerable populations and the disease had the perfect combination of symptomatic subtlety and extended incubation period to maximize its R0 value. The project of Globalization had ensured a relative ease of international travel, trade, and communication. A general culture of individualism was prevalent throughout much of the industrialized world and the systems in place demanded that the humans maintain employment to live. Political leaders, in concert with media outlets, had spent decades undermining public trust in science and information. These factors combined made control of the disease nearly impossible, and it spread like wildfire across the globe. The result was an international lockdown, with governments encouraging citizens to stay in their homes, isolated for the majority of year 2020 AD. The world economy came to a halt and the planet, even if just for a brief moment, began to heal. But being an extremely social species by nature, this circumstance left many of the humans lonely, depressed, and desperate for connection.

It was in this moment that a network of empathic artists, scientists, curators, and writers known as the Institute of Queer Ecology, IQECO for short, imagined the dawn of a new era. The Institute recognized that effective change to save the Earth would be fractal, adaptive, interdependent, decentralized, non-linear, iterative, resilient, and aimed toward transformative justice with the goal of creating more possibilities. They began their work with the creation of a manifesto. Disguised as an edutainment video series, the manifesto titled Metamorphosis employed the life stages of holometabolous insects as a metaphor for IQECO’s proposal to radically restructure the human relationship with the environment. It was disseminated via the internet and centered queerness as “the warm illumination of a horizon imbued with potentiality…an ideality that can be distilled from the past and used to imagine a future.”

Metamorphosis would serve as a founding document for HORIZON, a prototype for the kind of world that once seemed impossible. Ours is a community formed through sym-poiesis, where science and speculation, fact and fable comingle in profound and productive ways. Upon entering your new home, you will receive a uniform of an orchid jumpsuit. After registering as a resident, your face shall be obscured and your identity will remain anonymous, unless you wish to reveal your name. The rules are simple. You must remain respectful of HORIZON and its other inhabitants at all times. So long as this rule is complied with, we encourage you to befriend and fall in love with your fellow inhabitants.

You will notice that there are various locations within HORIZON that house information germane to their function within the community. You may access this information freely, and if you have something relevant to share, please do so in the space that feels most appropriate. Women Wisdom has it that “the more you share, the less you need… the more that goes around the more you get back.” We hope that you take what you need, and give what you can. Finally, there is a stage within the commune that will serve as a venue for live events in the near future. I recommend that you pay close attention to communications from our founders to learn more about these happenings.

Now that your orientation briefing is complete, I am pleased to acknowledge that you have arrived at HORIZOOOOOOOoooooooo0oo00000….. [System Error 20.12.21: a horizon by definition, being a point in the distance, is always determined in contrast to one’s current location and is therefore not a destination where one can physically arrive]

References:
Adrienne Maree Brown, Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds
Jose Esteban Munoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity
Donna J. Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chuthulcene
Larry Mitchell, The Faggots and Their Friends Between Revolutions.

Text by Alan Seise

The Symbiotic Shore (2021)

Nov 27th 2021 - Feb 11th, 2022

Bas Fisher Invitational
644 Collins Ave
Miami Beach, FL, 33139

Installation view of “The Symbiotic Shore” a group exhibition curated by the Institute of Queer Ecology (2021).
Photo by Lee Pivnik. Courtesy of the Institute of Queer Ecology, Bas Fisher Invitational and Bridge Initiative.

Installation view of “The Symbiotic Shore” a group exhibition curated by the Institute of Queer Ecology (2021).

On Compost: Land Art (ongoing), Laurencia Strauss. Newspaper, worms, produce, bins, photographs. 9 compost fields, each: 19 1/2 x 30 x 7 1/2 in (49.5 x 76.2 x 19 cm). Installation view of “The Symbiotic Shore” a group exhibition curated by the Institute of Queer Ecology (2021).

Rootpicker (2021), Rian Ciela Hammond. Single channel digital video, color, sound
8:05 min, looped. Installation view of “ The Symbiotic Shore” a group exhibition curated by the Institute of Queer Ecology (2021).

The Symbiotic Shore: Excerpts from IQECO Fire Island Image Archive (2019), Various Artists for the Institute of Queer Ecology. 44 towels, each 33 x 57 in (83.82 x 144.8 cm) Installation view of “The Symbiotic Shore” a group exhibition curated by the Institute of Queer Ecology (2021).

Cash Magic (2021), Utē Josephine Petit. 4 Framed Drawings, Flags, Found Saris, Glassware, Chair, Wood Fencing, Buoys, Casino Star, Iroquois White Corn, Tony Chacheries, Peach Nehi, Found Jewelry, Window Slats, Fishing rope , Watering can, broken auto glass. Dimensions variable. Installation view of “The Symbiotic Shore” a group exhibition curated by the Institute of Queer Ecology (2021).

(Left) For those of us who live at the shoreline (sunrise) (2020), Sasha Wortzel. Video, color, silent, 1:01 min, looped. (Right) For those of us who live at the shoreline (sunset) (2020), Sasha Wortzel. Video, color, silent , 5:21 min, looped. Installation view of “ The Symbiotic Shore” a group exhibition curated by the Institute of Queer Ecology (2021).

For their upcoming Waterproof Miami project with Bas Fisher Invitational and Bridge Initiative, the Institute of Queer Ecology (IQECO) will present an exhibition that proposes evolving Miami into a “Symbiotic City:” a civic strategy for environmental harm reduction and climate adaptation. The ongoing project of saving this world requires constantly remaking it, re-grounding the work in mutualistic symbioses rather than individualistic competition.
Coastal cities around the globe are currently engaged in conversations about how to fortify themselves against the climate-perils of tomorrow. Local governments often frame these conversations in terms of the preservation of real estate assets and local economies above water so that “business as usual” can continue. These plans, which are made from the top down, without addressing the root causes of climate-change and habitat degradation, leave behind countless people and species. The notion that competition breeds evolution has spread from social Darwinism and taken root in a socioeconomic worldview that has naturalized the global exploitation and unsustainable extraction of labor and resources. In Miami and beyond, it’s critical not only to build resilience against climate change, but to cultivate a regenerative ethos.

Here, standing on The Symbiotic Shore, IQECO advocates for a new empathic paradigm: to understand other species (and ourselves) through alternative survival strategies of symbiosis, mutualism, and interdependence. Right now, around and inside us, our bodies bloom with 40 trillion+ bacterial cells—we are more bacterial than human. We have evolved to live in symbiosis with our microbiomes over millions of years—we are walking multispecies amalgamations, interdependent on each other and our environments for mutual support. In Miami, we walk through a city built of coral, an animal that survives only in a mutualistic relationship with photosynthetic algae. Yet, we plan, build, and act in resistance to this vibrant and complex living world around us. We sterilize everything we touch.

To begin imagining this ecozoic shift—away from competition, towards mutualism—this exhibition brings together artists living in Miami and other coastal cities: the liminal, romantic, real edges of the sea and shore, increasingly defined by their environmental precarity. Memories, dreams, and experiences materialize into visions of a future where coastal cities don’t fortify themselves against a rapidly changing world, but change themselves to meet the moment’s needs. The show—the shore—is sincere and tactile. From an altar constructed of hurricane debris collected along the Gulf Coast, an audio composition that gives voice to the worsening water conditions in Biscayne Bay, and a photo archive transmuted onto beach towels documenting a formative IQECO residency in the queer towns of the Fire Island National Seashore, the exhibition traces a line from New Orleans, down Florida, and up the Eastern Seaboard, bringing together artists concerned with the future changes faced by the places they live and love.

Alternative, queer readings of evolutionary biology and ecology can inform and re-form how we see ourselves as a species, particularly regarding the mutual benefits that cooperation brings to the interconnected social infrastructures of all species. The Institute of Queer Ecology plots a new trajectory forward, one where we transform our one-sided, parasitic relationships with the environment into networks of symbiosis and mutualism, regeneration and care—as a city, a society, and a species.

Molly Adams
Trevor Bashaw
Evander Batson
Parker Bright
Andres Chang
Allyson Church
Nicolas Baird
Lee Pivnik
Francisco Cordero
Tiger Dingsun
Luba Drozd
Erin Ehrenfried

Casey Halter
Tristan Higgenbotham
Wilson Keithline
Deirdre Keough
David Kim
Aidan Alexis Koch
Shannon Lee
Jolie Ngo
Faris Al-Shathir
Jen Sillen
Yannik Stevens

Summer Jade Leavitt
Germán Enrique Caceres Cueto
Libbi Ponce
Archival Feedback
Laurencia Strauss
Rian Hammond
TJ Shin
Utē Josephine Petit
Sasha Wortzel

Hysteria (2023)

-is a film about contamination and unworlding,
and the medieval dancing plagues, of course.

Hysteria was jointly presented as a multi-channel video installation at Kestner Gesellschaft, and a single-channel short film at the Everson Museum with Light Work’s Urban Video Project.

Kestner Gesellschaft | Hanover, Germany
Mar. 4 - June 4, 2023
Curated by Alexander Wilmschen

- Exhibition Catalog
- Quilt Edition

Everson Museum | Syracuse, NY
Oct. 12 - Dec 16, 2023
Presented by Lightwork - Urban Video Project

In Hysteria, the Institute of Queer Ecology construct an ecofeminist retelling of the poorly understood “dancing plagues” that swept through Europe between the tenth and the seventeenth centuries. The afflicted dancers are subtly recast as pointedly subversive agents entangled in environmental contagion and contamination that drive these wild, manic uprisings.

Hysteria is a collaboration between Daniel Ayat, Nicolas Baird, Maya Bjornson, Dasychira (Adrian Martens), Nadia Hannan, Juan Heilbron, Aimee Lin, Juan Luis Matos, Lee Pivnik, and some lovely students at Syracuse University who were taking a Queer Performance class, or working with Light Work. <3

Dancing plagues (also referred to as dancing mania, choreomania, and tarantism) were spontaneous social phenomena in which groups of people, at times in the thousands, danced erratically and without restraint. The mania affected people of all ages and genders, and they often danced until they collapsed from exhaustion or suffered injury and even death. Although the phenomenon is well documented and affected multitudes of people across several centuries, these choreomanic events are still poorly understood. Some current theories explicitly cite ecological factors as likely origins for these choreomanic events. In one suggestion, the fungal disease ergotism, once known as St. Anthony’s fire, might be responsible for provoking widespread psychosocial turmoil. Ergot fungus would spread to rye and other grains in the damp periods following floods and in unseasonably rainy years, and the fruiting bodies of these fungi can cause hallucinations and convulsions when ingested.

In their recent work, the IQECO navigates the idea of a vanishing “nature” through frameworks of queer futurity. The artists assume a position of critical optimism, in part as a coping mechanism for the pain of living in, engaging with, and loving a biodiverse world that is being undeniably annihilated.